The skills required to do our jobs will change by 65% by 2030, and driven by the increasing use of AI, there has been a 2.2 times increase in job roles mentioning AI or Gen AI over the past two years.

Both these facts point to a rapidly changing job market that will force both candidates and employers to stay on their toes. With 90% of HR professionals agreeing that their role has become more strategic, AI is slowly becoming integral to hiring itself. To understand how Gen AI can enhance hiring protocols, help find relevant candidates and reduce the time to hire top talent, People Matters recently conducted a webinar, ‘Reimagine hiring with the power of AI’ in collaboration with LinkedIn Talent Solutions. With discussion among top leaders and the launch of LinkedIn’s Recruiter 2024, the webinar was a confluence of innovation and insight. 

Here are some key highlights from the discussion.

The changing landscape of recruitment and LinkedIn’s pivotal role

Ruchee Anand, Senior Director, Talent and Learning Solutions, LinkedIn India, set the context by explaining that over the past few years, HR and talent acquisition leaders have not only dealt with change but embraced change and redefined hiring, engagement and people management practices. The role of a talent leader has changed from an administrative role ensuring productivity and performance to a dynamic role dealing with myriad challenges, such as hybrid work culture, agile career development, burnout prevention, generational shifts and workplace well-being. HR leaders have been agile in reading the winds proactively and using them favourably to adapt, move forward, and view change with hope instead of fear. Ruchee succinctly shed light on how the following forces of change have been the most significant in shaping larger HR and hiring trends:

• Economic change: A more insular and volatile world with conflict and instability has impacted businesses, and by effect, employee work experiences
• Generational change: A younger and diverse workforce is prioritising values like sustainability and flexibility as people want companies to be more authentic, transparent and have a positive impact on the world
• Green transformation: A transition to greener and more environment-friendly business practices has led to companies announcing aggressive net zero target goals, necessitating new skills, roles and business functions 
• Technological advancement: Everyday use of Gen AI tools has already automated mundane and repetitive tasks, and now AI technologies are on their way to permanently redefine work.

As organisations grapple with these challenges, the focus on individual skills has never been higher, and many organisations have already dropped job titles in favour of defining roles through their skills and tasks. It’s clear that Gen AI can replicate some aspects of every role, but the exposure varies across industries and jobs. It’s also becoming more evident that roles requiring people-centric skills will face only partial disruptions. In contrast, other types of jobs may require learning new skills to augment existing capabilities. Across industries, leaders are looking to use AI to free up time for more creative, strategic, and people-centric work, which means that, in a way, AI will help make work more human.

LinkedIn has been at the forefront of this change as the platform boasts over a billion users and is working towards creating economic opportunities for everyone. Delivering on this vision has never been more important or challenging, as TA professionals now have a more sophisticated view of how they want to engage talent. With exclusive technological support from Microsoft, coupled with insights from over a billion professionals, LinkedIn is uniquely positioned to understand the current hiring landscape and identify trends before they become disruptive. With 5 million updates taking place in the company’s data economic graph every minute, AI has now come to the forefront and can help recruiters find, engage and nurture the most suitable candidate effortlessly. Ruchee shared that the goal is to change every ‘I wish’ career statement to ‘I can’ through conversational support and coaching. A world with a new hiring playbook, where AI helps hire the right people faster, is knocking at our door, and we must embrace the change to create new systems that positively impact people, organisations and economies. 

LinkedIn Recruiter 2024: Empowering TA professionals to rewrite the hiring playbook 

Bhavna Bandyopadhyay, Manager, Customer Success at LinkedIn Talent Solutions, India, explains that disruption with a new technology usually happens slowly, and many people ignore it thinking it’s another fad. But, when truly transformative developments make their presence felt, no one can contain them, and early adopters have a clear edge. Gen AI is a similar milestone in our history, and HR practitioners need agility to adapt to the slew of changes it will create.

Along with agility, they will also require the right technological support, knowledge, skills and a safe space to experiment and learn. LinkedIn surveys have shown that a majority of recruiters (74%) are expecting AI to take over repetitive tasks to enable them to do more strategic decision-making, whereas another 67% want AI tools to source candidates faster, and another 59% envision better candidate engagement. Bhavna says that LinkedIn’s Recruiter 2024 does all this and more as the key innovations in the latest launch include features that can empower TA professionals to hire qualified candidates faster:

• AI-assisted candidate discovery: To enable better discovery of candidates for requirements, narrow and wide
• Smarter candidate suggestions: Better matching of candidates using specific data points, like interest in organisation
• Simplified candidate outreach: Gen AI-supported hyper-personalised candidate engagement with automated follow-ups
• Actionable data points and insights: To decipher how to enhance your hiring strategy and articulate impact 

With the launch of these capabilities in LinkedIn’s Recruiter 2024, TA professionals can start looking for candidates using a simple prompt listing job requirements, which can be picked verbatim from meetings and conversations. The embedded AI tool will automatically populate other fields of the posting, such as skills, and recommend smart suggestions to make the search more comprehensive by adding related job titles. With insights such as how much time it takes to close a typical role posted on LinkedIn, hiring managers can also set realistic timelines. 

AI has powered the bigger part of the internet in the past decade, but it has worked behind the scenes to improve search results and fine-tune hiring preferences. With LinkedIn’s Recruiter 2024, HR professionals can expect more transparency in understanding why a particular candidate ranks higher in the results or why they may be a better fit. Besides holistic candidate profiling and engagement, recruiters will also get useful nudges to make the hiring process more efficient and manage pending actions for several open positions with a single action. As Bhavna shared, when you pilot the next phase of your organisation’s hiring strategy, LinkedIn’s Recruiter 2024 will serve as a trusted co-polit, supporting you in what needs to be done. This deep and comprehensive understanding of talent, combined with dynamic matching capabilities and AI-generated candidate engagement, means that recruitment will become simpler, faster and more relevant for TA professionals going forward. 

AI-driven hiring: A dialogue with industry leaders

Shannon Ludovissy, Director of Product Marketing at LinkedIn, moderated an insightful panel discussion on leveraging AI tools in hiring. Setting the stage, he remarked, “The incredible impact of AI on recruitment and LinkedIn has been on a global journey to share, understand and co-create value from Gen AI tools by engaging TA professionals and HR leaders. With LinkedIn recently crossing a billion members, the future looks more exciting than ever.”  

Strategic implementation of AI in hiring

Rajita Singh, Chief People Officer, Kyndryl, says that organizational design, leadership support and integration with existing systems are critical to ensure that AI-driven changes meet their purpose and do not overwhelm an already-overworked HR team. In addition to introducing new tools, HR must reduce the number of systems already in place and simplify internal workflows. For this, HR professionals must consider themselves creators, developers and consultants who can design and integrate new technology for maximum employee value. Rekha Desai, CHRO, SBICAP Trustee Company Limited, added that organisations need to review their policies as the advent of AI in HR will undeniably require a new people management framework. It’s also helpful to remember that people continue to be at the core of hiring, and AI is an assistive tool, not the end goal in itself. For the BFSI sector specifically, there is a need to consider the safety, privacy and governance of such tools that align with industry and organisational standards.

Manav Lalotra, Head - Corporate HR, TA & Transformation, STL - Sterlite Technologies Limited, said that AI tools have shown immense potential in sourcing better candidates, increasing the speed of hiring and allowing younger recruiters to take up relatively complex hiring tasks. For both fast-paced hiring required for resource augmentation and strategic hiring for niche leadership roles, AI has specific use cases and capabilities that augment existing practices.

Ensuring fairness and transparency in AI-driven recruitment

Rajita noted that building a fairer AI recruitment system needs diverse team members building the foundational data sets. This can ensure adequate representation and reduce certain types of biases automatically, whereas having transparency and explainability of AI frameworks can help people understand how and when AI tools are making certain decisions. Finally, feedback and accountability must be built as a core value of the system to ensure fairness and continuous improvement. 

Manav said that to leverage the benefits offered by AI recruitment tools, we need clarity on what part of the internal hiring ecosystem it impacts. For higher objectivity and fairness, we must deconstruct the entire recruitment process, map skills with people more accurately and help hiring managers stay one step ahead to identify biases. Rekha adds that organisations must also clearly state in the job description or during the assessment stage that AI tools are a part of the recruitment process. This awareness is essential when catering to candidates of different age groups. Subsequently, there should be room for the candidates to ask questions, share feedback, and even challenge decisions based on AI evaluations. 

To sum up, here are the key takeaways from the discussion:

• Job skills are to change by 65% by 2030 and there will be 2.2 times increase in AI-related job roles.
• The forces shaping HR trends are economic, generational, green, and technological changes.
• Agility is crucial for AI adoption and empowers early adopters to gain an edge.
• There should be fairness in AI recruitment which makes diverse teams, transparency, and accountability essential.
• Deconstruct recruitment for fairness by communicating AI use and encouraging candidate feedback.
• A candidate-centric approach calls for ensuring clarity, feedback, and transparency in AI-driven hiring.